Process control has historic origins in improving the yield and efficiency of manufacturing enterprises. Numerous methods for process control are used in countless domains of instantiation. Inclusive of their variations and combinations, process control techniques are presently finding application in improving the yield and efficiency of logical and physical processes; including technological, bio-physical, mercantile, and social enterprises. These diverse types of enterprises, along with classical manufacturing type enterprises are presently evolving into hyper-complex data management and optimization tasks.
Given the seemingly ever-increasing capacity of computer processing to perform tasks (e.g. data gathering, data storage, data management, and data related modeling), and given that this growth of task performance provides logical facilities for higher complexity modeling activities, there has arisen a pressing need in the art for facile tools that provide accurate strategies for managing process control activities. Furthermore, there is a continuously growing need for strategic methods for integrating a plurality of locally optimized processes into some presumptive better global optimization.
This need has stood as a substantial barrier to the broad application of process control, even in manufacturing enterprises that only have the seemingly straightforward tasks of unifying already process controlled tools into process controlled modules; and then into process controlled manufacturing enterprise systems (MES). Simply stated, there is a need in the art for a strategic process control method that will extend the known benefits of process control to higher order activities. There is an especially long felt need for a strategic process control method that is, on the one hand, conceptually facile for varying levels of process control professionals to use, and that is, on the other hand, facile for integration with higher order mathematical modeling theories.
There follows five Internet accessible references, which each independently attempts to articulate solutions to substantial sub-sets of the aforesaid outstanding needs. It should be appreciated that even if these references were combined into some hybrid system, there would still remain the aforesaid outstanding needs; especially since any such combination would decimate any operational expectation for conceptual simplicity.
http://www.iac.honeywell.com/journal/feb97/j29739.htm
Open solutions: a strategic approach—Paul Peters—Senior Process Control Engineer—Hoechst Celanese Bishop Plant—Bishop, Tx.
http://www.iac.honeywell.com/services/networks/about.htm
ABOUT INDUSTRIAL-STRENGTH NETWORKS—Overview—Manufacturers are recognizing the increasing value of integrating specific information embedded within the process control domain into the business information domain and vice versa. The availability and accuracy of this information is critical to the success of your enterprise.
http://www.gintic.gov.sg/recruit1.html
R&D in Manufacturing Technology—Gintic is a national research institute proactively involved in collaborative applied R & D projects with the industry and contract research. Funded by the National Science and Technology Board, Gintic's mission is to enhance the competitiveness of the Singapore industries through the generation and application of advanced manufacturing technology.
http://www.tu-chemnitz.de/wirtschaft/wi2/loos/wbf95/wbf95.htm
Production Management—Linking Business Applications to Process Control—Peter Loos—Institut fuer Wirtschaftsinformatik—University of Saarland, Saarbr?cken, Germany—published in: World Batch Forum 1995 (Proceedings, Newtown Square, PA, May 22-24, 1995), pp 2.1-2.16.
http://www.ece.orst.edu/˜barreta/sme/sme.htm
A Software Architecture and Environment for Flexible Manufacturing—Spencer B. Barrett—Member of Technical Staff—Intelledex, Incorporated—Corvallis, Oreg.; CONFERENCE: Semiconductor Manufacturing—Oct. 30, 1990—Tempe Arizona—This paper describes a process control software system for manufacturing cell and cluster control. An object-oriented approach that permits on-line configuration of objects provides a simplistic, flexible and extendible system. Automated design tools help create, analyze, document, and maintain the different classes of objects used in the system.
Collectively, the preceding five Internet accessible references have numerous common factors. All of them are forced into some sort of multi-level approach in order to express the complexity of integrating an ensemble of interrelated process events into a single MES-type view. The parent application of the present invention was likewise forced into constructing a multi-layer model in order to express the complexity of integrating an ensemble of interrelated process events into a single MES-type view. However, the resultant integration, implementation, and process control method of the prior art (such as those described in these references) remain excessively cumbersome; and do not lend themselves to any proof of their respective efficacy. There remains a need in the art for improvement in process control, especially for a facile integration of any arbitrary plurality of interrelated process events.